In the classical three-layer architecture of fronted, middleware and backend
processes, Zato is best suited at the middle or far backend of your IT
infrastructure.

Areas where Zato shines are business integration - such as implementing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB),
and core services - billing, customer management,
purchase processing, supporting marketing campaigns, core banking and many
similar activities that form a backbone of an enterprise.

Zato can serve as either an ESB or an application server and a successful implementation
of a Zato environment allows for:

aiding in introducing and optimizing complex business processes

creating software solutions in less time

connecting dispersed applications

enabling the communication between systems with incompatible interfaces

unifying access methods to independent applications

introducing a common security model across different parts of the IT infrastructure

Zato environments are composed of clusters, each of which is a set of servers
and supporting applications running in an HA configuration.

At its very core, the Zato’s production ready processing capabilities allow you
to:

create reusable services

transform messages between different formats

orchestrate the services of multiple autonomous systems

send and receive messages between multiple transport protocols available, using either
synchronous or asynchronous methods

log, audit and monitor messages flowing through the platform

validate the messages according to certain business rules

enrich the messages from different sources

queue the messages if the applications involved within the integration scenarios run at
different processing speeds

implement services in less time using Python, a very high-level programming language
that promotes ease of use and development speed. A Hello World
service is shown below. Such a service can be hot-deployed onto a cluster
without a need to restart servers.

Zato has a slick and powerful web admin application for administrator to manage
the environments. Web admin allows one to perform routine, planned as well as
ad-hoc activities, such as deploying services, configuring security, access channels,
browsing the messages and more.

Note

Almost no server restarts are required. Servers automatically reload their configuration
without disrupting the message processing. Almost all changes propagate across all nodes
of a cluster completely behind the scenes.